Release 20120228 - a canonical artist rule
March 06, 2012 in bliss by Dan Gravell
In this new release a new rule; the canonical artist rule.
Many music collections contain subtly differing artist names which makes browsing your collection difficult. If different albums by the same artist are associated with diverging spellings of the artist it can make it harder to find the album when you browse by artist. Is Back in Black filed under AC/DC or AC-DC?
The canonical artist rule takes each artist in your collection and looks up on the MusicBrainz database whether this artist name is a well known alias, misspelling or acronym. Other examples are "Beatles" which may be an alias for "The Beatles" or "JS Bach" which may be an alias for "Johann Sebastian Bach". Information about what constitutes an alias is here.
To use, open the settings panel and make sure the Music information panel is shown. Click Fill in missing information if not. Here's how it should appear (your settings may differ if you've already used this panel):
See Artist names? That's the canonical artist rule. To enable the canonical artist rule, click the drop down and choose Enforce canonical names instead of aliases. Then click 'Apply rules' and bliss begins assessing your artist names.
When bliss finds an artist which is a known alias for a 'canonical' artist, it alerts you by marking the album uncompliant and offers a fix to rename the artist to the canonical name. There's also an Inbox item to help you accept more responses quickly.
There's some more work to come on this rule. I want to support sort order names (e.g. renaming "Beatles, The" to "The Beatles") if required. There are also a few false negatives which come through at the moment. And going forward maybe supporting user-determined overrides would be good (maybe people want sort order names, or maybe they just prefer "JS Bach"). Why not suggest your ideas for improvement on the bliss ideas forum?
A fix to uploading or providing a URL for artwork
Worthy of special mention is a fix to an issue that a few people have reported. bliss was not displaying the new art installed via the Provide URL or Upload an image options on the change art screen, even though (in the typical case) the art was successfully installed. The artwork would show once the album was manually 'rescanned', but it would be a pain to have to rescan each album manually after uploading. Now, bliss re-assesses the album after the upload takes place and as a result the new art should appear in the bliss user interface.
Other improvements
- Fingerprinting of untagged files now occurs in parallel to scanning of music files
- Files that have already been fingerprinted and their data looked up are not re-queried
- Tagging the files in a folder now costs one fix
- There's a new 'help' page containing instructions for submitting emails and a link to the debug archive
The new release can be downloaded from the downloads page. Your existing fixes will apply!
Thanks to dj goulash for the image above.
